Official blog of the Greater Sacramento Progressive Alliance, one of the largest and most vibrant progressive activist groups in California with more than 7,000 members. We mobilize Progressives in Sacramento, the surrounding foothill areas, and at Sac State and Folsom Lake College.

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Sanders Campaign and Racial Justice

Sanders Forum;
Great event last night at the Sol Collective.
Report on Crisis in the Eurozone well received.Eleven
Theses on Bernie Sanders’ Campaign and Racial Justice

Joseph M.
Schwartz

Whatever their opinion of the #BlackLivesMatter
intervention at Netroots Nation, the incident should spur the Sanders campaign
and its supporters to focus on the campaign’s major challenge: broadening its appeal beyond the white
progressive community. Given that thirty-five percent of Democratic primary
voters are Black and Latino, even the most fervent of Sanders supporters cannot
be complacent about this question.

Sanders has done a great public service by
framing his presidential campaign as a crusade of the 99 percent against the
one percent. But to broaden his coalition, he and his campaign staff must work
to gain the trust of progressive activists of color and bring them into the
heart of the campaign. Bernie will not get a hearing in communities of color if
he does not develop partnerships with Black and Latino activists who can introduce
him -- and vouch for him -- in communities to which the long-time resident of
Vermont (a 95 percent white state) has few organic ties.

Bernie’s standard stump speech sometimes touches
upon racial and gender justice issues, and immigrant rights. But the twelve
point program on his website does not mention mass incarceration, police
brutality, voter suppression, immigrant rights or reproductive rights. Nor does
his standard fundraising letter.

When Bernie does touch on these concerns, he
quickly ties them to issues of economic justice. Economic equality is a necessary, but not
sufficient condition for eliminating forms of oppression that cannot be reduced
to class. Bernie needs to learn how to speak about these concerns in ways that
connect with folks who have a gut sense that greater attention to economic
inequality will not by itself fully redress racism, sexism, homophobia, and
nativism.

While national polls remain fairly imprecise at
this point in a presidential run, none show Bernie doing better than nine
percent among likely Democratic primary voters of color – and, at best, he only polls at five percent among
African-Americans. In contrast Bernie is hovering in the low-to-mid 20s among
likely white Democratic primary voters and nears 50 percent support among white
self-defined liberal or progressive likely primary voters. Hillary polls well
over sixty percent support among likely Democratic primary voters of color.

One shouldn’t have to nail the following eleven
theses to the door of Sanders national headquarters in the hope that all of us
backing Sanders address them.

1. Some Bernie enthusiasts want to deny that the
above problems exist.Yet simply for
reasons of electoral math Bernie has to take these issues to heart. Hillary's
clear electoral strategy is to win among white working class women and
self-identified liberal feminists and to clean Bernie's clock among Blacks and
Latinos. The political capital of the Clinton brand has enabled her to gain
endorsements from many Black and Latino Democratic elected officials. So what
is Bernie’s counter-strategy? It must be to push his core activists to build
local grassroots multi-racial coalitions. If Bernie can't build more of a
rainbow campaign he may turn out to be the Howard Dean of 2016. Dean did well
with white liberal college-educated middle strata in Iowa and New Hampshire and
then died in multi-racial major states. It wasn’t “the scream” that killed the
campaign; it was its monochromatic nature.

2. Politics is about trust and social relationships; issue-oriented speeches
alone do not recruit constituencies. Bernie needs to engage in serious
consultation with progressive activists of color who can vouch for him in their
communities. Bernie has yet to appoint a person of color (or woman) to a senior
staff position. Hillary Clinton’s staff, meanwhile, is consciously multi-racial
and gender balanced.

3. Hillary has given separate, dedicated addresses
on mass incarceration, police brutality, voter suppression, and immigrant
rights. Those speeches only offered moderate neo-liberal solutions (e.g., more flexible
sentencing guidelines). But she gave those addresses to Black and Latino organizations
in part to distinguish herself from Sanders. (Bernie has given one speech primarily
devoted to immigrant rights’, an invited address the annual convention of the
National Council of La Raza). The Clintons are smart opportunists. It’s time
for Bernie to give well-publicized addresses exclusively devoted to each of
these topics to predominantly Black and Latino audiences. If the campaign
cannot arrange such venues this says something serious about the limited scope
of the campaign.

4.Bernie’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, said a month ago that the
campaign would add major staffers whose charge was to do outreach to
communities of color. The Sanders campaign has recently appointed an outreach
coordinator for the African-American community. But he has to do more. Only
twenty-five percent of likely primary voters of color say they know enough
about Bernie to make a political judgment about him; in contrast, over eighty percent
of likely white Democratic primary voters say they know enough about Sanders to
judge him.

5.Bernie's core base of support is within the white progressive community;
just look at the pictures from his huge rallies in Houston or Dallas,
communities that are majority people of color. It’s great that many of his
white supporters are young. This is a base from which to build. But expanding
the base has to be Bernie’s primary concern. After New Hampshire and Iowa, he's
on to South Carolina, where sixty percent of Democratic primary voters are African-American;
and then Nevada, where forty percent of Democratic primary voters are Latino.

6. If whites in the Sanders campaign want to win,
as well as build a stronger multi-racial left, they cannot afford to react
defensively when activists of color—and white anti-racist activists—criticize
Bernie for not being vocal enough about racial justice and immigrant rights
issues.Yes, Bernie touches on these
issues in sections of some of his stump speeches. But addressing these issues
head-on and admitting the campaign needs to reach out to voters of color is
both morally imperative and politically astute.

7. Bernie has a solid track record on racial
justice issues. But like many white socialists of his generation he frames racial
justice issues as best addressed through economic policy. (The same is true of
many white male socialists in regards to questions of gender justice.) His
standard statement on mass incarceration cites full employment as the best way
to decrease rates of imprisonment. But
Bernie should know that gender-and-racially segmented labor markets could lead
to a full employment economy with Blacks, Latinos and women stuck
disproportionately in dead-end, low-wage service jobs.

Bernie should openly state that racial justice issues
relate to economic justice concerns, but cannot be reduced to them. To use the
language of the academy, he needs to show that he understands that forms of
injustice are “intersectional.” Three examples of this “intersectional” reality:
1. Working-class and poor Blacks between the ages of 18-30 are eight times as
likely to be in jail or prison as are working class and poor whites. 2. Due to red-lining
and mortgage discrimination, middle-class Blacks live in poorer neighborhoods
than do poor whites (low-income whites tend to live proximate to working-class
and middle- class whites). 3. African-American and Latino youth are subject to
arbitrary violence by police infinitely more so than are whites of comparable
class status. White skin privilege exists (though that’s cross-cut by class, as
working class and poor whites confront police brutality far more than do
affluent whites).

8. Bernie
should work to avoid seeming to be a "white social democrat wtih a racial
blind spot.” Yes, Bernie was active in
the civil rights movement. But whites of that generation who were civil rights
activists often were tone deaf to the rise of the Black and Brown Power
movement, as well as the feminist movementMany never came to fully understand the change in consciousness that
took place among people of color and women as they moved from desiring
integration to fighting for empowerment.

9. Most folks who have worked with Bernie would
admit that he, like Jessie Jackson, is his own primary advisor and does not
take advice from others readily.So it
will take concerted pressure from the grassroots to get Bernie and his staff to
focus on building a more multi-racial campaign. Bernie is not going to build a democratic movement
out of the campaign for us; so it is the responsibility of grassroots activists to build the local
multi-racial progressive coalitions behind Sanders that can last beyond the
campaign.

10. Bernie could radically alter U.S. political
discourse if he explained to voters how both Republican and neoliberal Democratic
policies on crime and welfare aimed to appeal
to working- class whites looking for an enemy to blame for their downward mobility, while deflecting their
attention away from the role of corporate power.The issues of “welfare” and “crime” served as
the ideological battering ram for bi-partisan neoliberal attacks on progressive
taxation, public goods, the labor movement, and social rights. When Republicans
talk about the "takers" and the "makers," they are dog-whistling
to white working-class swing voters that the "takers" are people of
color and the "makers" are hard-working whites. Bernie should criticize President Clinton’s welfare
reform policies and crackdown on minor drug crimes (both of which Hillary
supported) as a continuation of Reagan’s attack on poor and working-class
people of all races.

11. Bernie is far better than Hillary on
racial justice issues. But that message won’t get out there by (mostly white)
Bernie supporters asserting this on social media. Bernie has to work with
activists of color to introduce himself to communities to which he is a
newcomer. And he must learn to articulate
his politics in a way that speaks to many people of color’s visceral sense that
while economic and racial oppression are intertwined, racism plays an,
independent role in the daily forms of oppression and degradation that they
face. That’s why #BlackLivesMatter.

If Bernie and his small, mostly Vermont-based
senior staff are not willing or able to do this, then Bernie will fail to run a
truly national presidential primary campaign. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Iowa
are 95 percent white; the country is nearing thirty-five percent people of
color. To operate on that larger terrain,
a campaign has to have a more diverse senior staff than Bernie does and must
work to build trust among activists who can introduce you to communities who
know little about you. That’s the way
politics works.

Joseph M. Schwartzis a National Vice-Chair of Democratic
Socialists of America and a professor of Political Science at Temple
University. He is the author, most recently, of The Future of Democratic Equality: Rebuilding Social Solidarity in a
Fragmented America. He played an active role in both Jessie Jackson’s 1984
and 1988 campaigns for president.

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Welcome to the PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE. We are a multi-racial, multi-issue "rainbow coalition" dedicated to social justice, peace and building progressive power. Our key priorities include economic justice; equal rights and equal opportunities for all regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation; international solidarity; humanitarian service; eradicating poverty at home and abroad; environmental protection and sustainable development; and electing progressives to public office and then holding them accountable.

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